Surfer Rosa and the attack of the Media Zombies
Surfer Rosa was the very first full length album by the Pixies. It was originally released in 1988. Not very many people knew who the Pixies were at that time . . . I did not know who they were back at that time . . . This is an album that never reached the top piers of musical success but yet is frequently cited as one of the ‘top albums of all time’ among hardcore music critics. Me, myself, I am not a music snob . . . really, I can just as easily listen to Bach as I can to Slipknot or to Mahavishnu Orchestra. I am easy going . . .
But, here is something that has to fucking end . . . no . . I mean HAS TO FUCKING END RIGHT NOW!!!
After a long period of not looking for the Pixies on youtube, I decided to look up a few tracks. Here is what was inexplicably displayed all over every tune from Surfer Rosa, like the random blood stains of some emo, super-sugar conformist, who both loves the almighty dollar and also hates himself with a deep passion :
SHOW ME MY BUZZ, Download the BAC Calculator App (something blurred and unreadable) App Store and Google Market
Let me be the first to say ‘hello there dear conformist, money grubber sir and FUCK YOU WITH A RUSTY BLOW DRYER!!! Dear god, has it really come to this? Have we really reached a time and age when even those things within the past two decades which used to represent freedom of expression are now used as further tools of conformity and commercialism? These days, people are better than ever at assigning a price tag to everything . . . these days I am more and more apt to throw a wood shoe into the gears and tell the entire system to fuck off . . . come join me won’t you?
Love and Love Not
Having been stung hard a few times now, I have allowed myself to become a bit more ‘realistic’ about relationships. I say that in quotes because while I think the current dating market is a complete backwards mess, there are definite advantages to learning how to swim in the waters — no matter that they are polluted.
So, I have a fallback now, for those times when my other prospects do not work out. She’s nice enough, just not someone who I was attracted to enough to pursue a serious relationship with. She claims to be alright with the idea that we are friends with benefits but I worry that she is going to fall for me and I will end up hurting her. Never before in my life had I had sex with anyone who had kids. I have crossed that barrier now. I never really thought about it much until the actual event was upon me. It came about in a rather odd way also. We were supposed to have a quiet weekend together at her place, but instead her ex husband showed up, along with his friends and their kids. The entire place was a mad house. I almost just turned around and left. While she is 8 years younger than I am, the years have not been nearly as kind to her as they have to me and I felt like I was selling myself short by putting up with all this funny business. But, I did stay, and we were able to break away to her bedroom to be by ourselves and watch a movie for a while. We got about 20-minutes in before we started making out. 30-minutes in and one of her kids was knocking on the door to ask some trivial question. 35-minutes in and she was going down to give me a blowjob. 40-minutes in and another kid was knocking at the door (I am just estimating I did not really time all this). Shortly after that she was taking her panties off and asking to have me inside of her. It was sort of amusing in a way, to take her while her ex husband was in the next room, blocked by nothing more than a flimsy wooden door. Still, we did not have time enough for me to really get off before there was another interruption. We finally the movie was over and we gave up for the time being and rejoined the crowd in the living room.
They were playing quarters when we came in and we ended up all sitting around the table and playing other drinking games for a while. By the end of the night, her ex had invited himself over to sleep on the couch. He kept trying to call her cell phone while we were back in the bed room and I was pounding her in earnest. I was half expecting some wide, gaping cavern, but she actually felt more like she had never been properly fucked in her life. Maybe she hadn’t been. I kept on her while she was jabbering away in incomprehensible languages and her ex kept trying to ring her cell phone which was sitting on the night stand and the bed was creaking at an obvious pitch. While I can not say that I am really attracted to her, she still inspired me to go a few rounds. We had a bet going on before hand about who would last longer . . . she lost horribly. While she is 8 years younger than I am, she just could not keep up. I don’t think anyone has ever really put her through the proper test before. She crashed out on me and later admitted that she slept better than she had in a long time. I was up all night, pondering the strange situation that I was in.
Come morning, I made up an excuse as to why I had to get back to my place. She was disappointed but also understanding. Her ex came out and smiled at me and said ‘hey man, sorry for being suck a dick last night!” I smiled back and said that I did not give a damn.
I feel bad in a way. It seems as though she has had a rough life . . . but then, who hasn’t had a rough struggle in some way or another in getting to where they are now? All we can really do is make the most of the moments that are given to us, and my quest now is to tap in to my true abilities and keeping taking those little steps until I am truly living life to the fullest.
The Stars, The Sky, and The Moon
“Sorry, Skype didn’t make a sound when I got your message, lol . . . and . . . aww *hugs* I’ve dreamed a lot of laying on a roof or a porch or somewhere and looking up at the stars.”
“The stars are nice, but you really gotta get out of town to see them in all their proper glory.”
“I live away from all the lights of the town.”
“Well then we will sneak off to some quiet place and take a blanket with us so we can lay out on the ground and look up and share the sky together.”
I am the king of long-distance relationships. I am not saying this is really something to boast about, but it is what it is. I blame part of it on my location (the girls here that I am actually attracted to are not all that responsive to my style), and the other part on my introverted tendencies. Online however, I am just the opposite — I become an extrovert through and through and can easily take the lead under any possible situation. Thus, I end up being involved with a lot of girls who may live anywhere in the world.
My very first experience with this went badly. It was with a girl that I had been hanging out with a lot (in a virtual sense) who one day asked “are you crushing on me?” I didn’t really think that I had done or said anything much that would lead her to suspect that I was ‘crushing on’ her but I said yes anyway, just to see where things led. It ended up leading to many hours of talking on the phone and us planning a trip to see each other. She lived in Ohio and I made the drive there in 12 hours, taking it out overnight. By mid-morning I was at her place and I walked up and knocked on the door . . . she was not what I expected . . . her facial features were fine enough but her body bore more resemblance to a beach ball than to a healthy, attractive female. Still, I had taken that step and put myself out there, and made the long trip, so I stuck it out and spent the weekend with her. She showed me all around her town and we had some genuine good times together, even though she seemed to also want to parade me around and be seen by her friends with me. The first night, there was no sex; she cuddled up close to me and nibbled at my ear but I pretended to just be tired and lay there on my back. She eventually gave up and just laid there with me, resting her arm across my chest. The second night the exact same scenario unfolded only this time she asked “is something wrong?” I figured there was nothing left to do but just do the deed, so I crawled over her, pinned her arms down against the bed and fucked her harder than she had probably been fucked in quite a long while. The next morning we parted and I returned home. We had a pleasant chat next to my car where we talked about the great weekend we had and said our goodbyes, but I knew in my heart that I had no intention of ever seeing her again.
I did not have another online encounter for a number of years. In the interim I went the more standard route and met (and in some cases lived with) girls here in my own town. Most of them were dry, fruitless relationships which held together more for the sake of convenience than for love. Growing tired of that, I ventured back into the online realm, not so much with the mindset that I would find someone better that way, but as a means of escaping from my discontent with my life. As a matter of pure chance, I ended up running in to someone who sincerely opened up my heart and helped me to grow as a person. We fell madly in love with each other; during our relationship not a single night passed where we were not talking to each other on the phone or over skype. I ended up making the 16 hour journey to see her. Two other such journeys followed. All of them were amazing times which shall forever be etched in my memory. It did not work out for us in the long run, and the split was actually very, very painful, but I have never regretted a single second of it all. In a way, I still sort of consider her the love of my life, even though I know we will never see each other again.
In the times since, I have had to harden myself a bit; to learn not to carry my heart so out in the open and to make people work a bit to be with me, rather than me charger forward at every moment to be with them. To me it seems unfortunate in a way, but it is the reality of modern relationships (unless you are ok with settling for a cold and boring existence). It has created some interesting adventures for me: I have been to Portland, Maine, to London, England, to Belgium and the Netherlands. At this immediate moment I have a number of prospects, the closest of which lives about a 45-minute drive away and the most distant lives in Australia. Almost all of them are extremely beautiful women. I have given up on selling all my heart to one person all in one instant so that I may take a wider view of the field and not have to suffer every burn while at the same time I am still open . . . no . . . enamored of the idea of dancing along the lines of the furthest extremes of love with that one precious person. Perhaps some day I will summon up the gumption to pack up and move somewhere more inviting . . . more receptive than where I am now. There are a lot of ‘maybes’ floating around. I am trying not to make too many assumptions. There is a new dawn, a new realm opening up before me and I am just now learning how to become the master of it all. With all of that being said, I still allow myself to be caring, loving, and sweet at times as well.
“Look up at the sky baby, you see the moon tonight?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“I’m looking at it too, that exact same light is shining upon us both, just like it would if you were here in my arms right now. One night soon we will know how that feels.”
How To Kill a Brown Recluse
I have found two of these inside my apartment recently. The two incidents happened a few days apart from each other. Now normally I do not kill anything that is of the animal kingdom– be it bird, insect, spider, horny toad, leopard gecko, manatee . . . whatever, they are all safe from me even if they decide to intrude into my own home (unless it is a member of the human species trying to break in unwanted, then we are talking a different sort of story). One reason for this is that I tend to ascribe to the Buddhist view that there is value in all forms of life. I don’t necessarily believe that a spider is the reincarnation of an ancient soul (though I do not entirely discredit the notion either), but more, I feel that all things have a purpose in the greater scheme of things and a right to go about and do their own thing as nature intended. However, I do not apply the concept equally; I tend to have more sympathy for the ‘lower’ animals of the world. Animals are just doing what they are supposed to do. The human race is not behaving as nature intended: namely, acting as though each one of us were the center of our own universe. If I somehow happened to have a job as a warden patrolling the Serengeti National Park, for example, and it came down to losing the life of another rhinoceros or taking down the poacher, I would have zero problem pulling that trigger. However, killing another person for the sake of some war? Forget it. That’s the most pointless thing ever.
Anyway, back to the spiders. I found the first one hanging out along my bathroom wall. Shit. I knew what it was the second I saw it; it was big enough that the markings were quite clear. Still, rather than kill it outright, I went back and grabbed my spider-and-insect-catching-jar, hoping that it would still be in the same spot when I came back. Luckily it was, although it was agitated and not very easy to catch. I had to take confidence in my aim and slam the jar up against the wall fast. One spider caught. At this point I was unsure what to do. If I let it go outside chances were it would just wander back in again, so I set the jar on the kitchen table and left it there overnight, figuring that I would come up with some plan in the morning. Next morning, it was curled up and dead in the jar. Well hell, I thought, maybe it isn’t a Brown Recluse after all. Wiki says that these things are supposed to be resilient and able to withstand many weeks without food or water. Since it was dead, I was able to get a better look. No, sure enough, it’s a true blue violin spider. Oh well, problem solved about what to do with it, and it isn’t exactly like I killed it.
A few days later, and another Brown Recluse shows up. This one was crawling up the kitchen wall. Well what the fuck? Again I go for the jar. Again I catch the spider in the jar. This one is even bigger than the first, but also slower and easier to catch. I set the jar back on the kitchen table and sit there for a moment, wondering why my pad is suddenly a Brown Recluse party zone. I leave this one there alone on the table overnight also but the next morning it is still alive, sitting there, waiting for me to make my next move — an ever-patient queen on a chess table. She is very aware also (I am assuming ‘she’ just because of the larger than average size of the spider). If I walk by the table, or reach to grab something close by to her little prison she lurches away to this side or that like a boxer. The next morning, she is still alive. Eventually I am going to have people over and I need to decide what to do about this spider. I don’t like the idea of letting her go somewhere close by. I can envision her going off and laying lots of eggs and then her progeny coming back over to pay a visit to where I have little Brown Recluse babies hanging out in every corner. Citing Wiki again, they are supposed to be very timid and rarely bite unless cornered or trapped, and even when they do bite necrosis only occurs 37% of time. A 37% chance at having a part of my skin rot still sounds like something to be avoided, but if I kill her, my luck it would give me bad spider karma and her cousins would pick up word of her death telepathically and put me on their shit list. I contemplate driving her off somewhere far far away in the woods and letting her go there. This seems like a good plan, but other things come up that I have to attend to and it also sorta slips my mind and I never do it. The final night, I stood there for a moment, looking at her, and her looking at me, and I grabbed a little notebook and placed it over the top of the jar. The next morning she was curled up like her friend before her. I took her little spider corpse inside the jar and tossed her over the fence out back far enough away that I could be like ‘I didn’t do it’. Lets hope I have some good Karma left in reserve still and I don’t see any more of them.
The Death of Letters
It’s a shame that the art of the hand-written letter has been almost completely lost. People say “Oh, but we have the convenience of email now.” True, but how many people actually write detailed, thoughtful, and well composed emails? The majority of the crap that circulates over the internet is regurgitated Lolcats pictures, chain letters and the like. How often do you receive an email where you feel that your friend or family member really sat down and took the time to concentrate on the moment and share their thoughts with you? Maybe in academia it happens often, but in the general populace I would say almost never.
Plus, letters are more personal, and a physical thing where you are allowed the anticipatory moments of tearing open the envelope and then unfolding the pages to see what this is that you now hold in your hands. Hand-written letters bear the graphological personality of the writer and tend to actually say much more than simply the words that are written.
All of this is a way of me arriving to the point that in our society, communication and love are both dying arts, and have been on the decline for some while now. The wealth of instant communication forms that we now have at our disposal certainly have their uses — but I do not feel they were ever meant to take the place of real, heartfelt communication between individuals who happen to not be in the same location. However, people, being the lazy beasts that we are, overfed on gossip and cheap entertainment, took advantage of this movement and then regressed, yes, regressed to a lower form of interpersonal communication.
I remember once when I was in high school, a girl who was interested in me sent me a letter, and she misspelled the name of the city and used rather bad grammar throughout but it still meant a hell of a lot more to me than some more recent text messages I have received such as “lol, I am so bored right now” or “hey, I am drunk and needed to drunk-text someone and you are it”.
I think that I have found a theme here. It is this: love is not dead, but it is dying. Resisting the current trends may be futile in regards to the overall current than mankind is drowning in, but there is still some resistance left and I am going to champion it. When I say ‘love’ do not take me to mean the ‘free love and happiness’ a la the 60’s hippie movement (which was a flawed idea, but not necessarily a bad one), but rather the full spectrum, the light and dark, the secure intimacy and the naked terror . . . the full platter which both fascinates people and scares the shit out of them at the same time. The loss of letters is just a simple little example of how personal intimacy has taken a downturn. If you have someone special in your life, or maybe even just a dear friend or relative, no matter even if they live far away or not, make their day by taking a little bit of your time to stir around in your thoughts until you find something good, spare a postage stamp, and send them a little surprise in the mail.
The Power of 42
This is a trick that I have learned to help me overcome internal fear and doubt and to avoid excessive hesitation __ not so much for life-changing moments, although it can work for some of those too, but for little things like making myself go out in front of people to give the speech that I do not want to give, or going up and talking to the girl that I feel too shy inside to talk to, or going backwards over the side of a cliff to rappel in the dark . . . I am probably not the first person to use this method, but I did not learn it from anyone else; I just worked it out on my own. At this point I don’t even really recall the moment when I chose the number 42 for this, but I assume I got it from the old Douglas Adams joke that 42 is the answer to the life, the universe, and everything. The trick is simple, and works thus: Whenever faced with one of these situations that cause my more meekly designed instincts to rise up and try to block my way, I count to 42 and when I reach that number, I go . . no matter what it is, no more excuses no more doubts, just go and do it, whatever it may be. After a while, you can train your body to follow this order. There is no bailing out, the magic number of 42 can not be disobeyed under any circumstance.
Really, you can use any number that you want for this. Some people may think that counting to 42 allows too much time for hesitation; but for me, it allows just enough time to give adequate warning to all my internal fears that they better go run back inside whatever mental filing cabinet that they came from, because the order is coming and this shit is going down whether you like it or not.
So there you have it, the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
The Birds of Missouri (Rehash)
“Which State?”
“Missouri.”
“Like literally.”
“What?”
“In Aust we pronounce that like ‘misery’”
“Ahh, yeah, that is the common joke.”
“Sad though.”
“What is sad?”
“The Joke.”
“I don’t know if I would call it sad. People like their paronomasia, until you hear it a thousand times and then it starts to lose its impact.”
“Hm.”
“People are plenty miserable all over the world; for good reasons, for bad reasons, not even knowing the reasons. There is no real center to it.”
“I used to be.”
“Not so much that I care about America. I think that nationalism in general is overused all over the world.”
“So now I am just being nationalistic?”
* * *
Does it bother anyone else but me that we are publicly aware of the contamination of the environment and yet take it all in stride? Maybe it is more like ‘misery’ if we have to be cautious even of the water. I have been to places that are in better shape, environmentally, and others that are worse off, but everywhere, the overall trend is towards decline. What is ‘natural’ today is but a small remaining scrap of what the natural world was even just 100 years ago – unless you want to count the acts of mankind as ‘natural’, since we are of this earth. Personally, I feel that once we left behind our hunter-gatherer ways and settled down to cultivate the land we have been pests digging at the roots of the natural world, chopping it up piecemeal and throwing all the little bits out the window. Whatever there once was that was actually wild has long since shit its pants and retreated to the few dark corners that are still left or else has been harvested and added to the mess that we are feeding to the millstone.
You can work it out both logically and ideologically that if we go on at this pace there will come an end to all the natural resources of the world long before their natural expiration date, and yet there are not that many people who are attempting to do anything about it, or who are even talking about it for that matter.
* * *
South Creek is a slimy, iridescent rut which bisects the city. One should wonder how even gets called a creek. Within town, the natural bank has been paved over in the manner of a large drainage ditch. The waters exit on the other side of town, reunited with the earth but in a traumatized state. Even the birds seem to understand that it is a bad situation and stay well away. The lone exception, oddly enough, is the ducks. Perhaps their super-adaptability to water allows them to much about in anything – so long as it isn’t radioactive at least.
* * *
Effortless being is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. It is like being adopted by a family of clouds in the sky. Let yourself win, because you can. Don’t worry about why it happens that way. Be more relaxed. Still your inner life to allow room for simpler, more pure things to enter inside and remain there longer without being slingshotted away by turmoil. Place your doubts out upon a cliff for air burial. The American Turkey Vulture (Cathartes Aura) flies over the Ozarks with as much intent as though they were flying above the Himalaya Mountains. They search out offerings left to the air. They pick the bones of still forms. They stand upon the flint rock into which your fears and inadequacies dissolve.
